Writing and other follies
Excerpt:
I was about a quarter of the way into What Technology Wants before I realised I was reading a religious text. It was quite a revelation. What Technology Wants is a book published a few years back ago by Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired magazine and a significant spokesman for what we might call the Silicon Valley Mindset. It takes us on a journey through the historical development of technology and into a future in which, Kelly believes, technology will be living force which controls our destiny.
The book starts by leading us on a journey through the development of technology, or perhaps more accurately, the idea of technology. The idea, it turns out, is a fairly new one. Though humans have been using tools since they first dug holes with sticks, and though the Greeks and the Romans invented everything from iron welding and the bellows through to blown glass and watermills more than two millennia ago, there was no sense that this collection of useful artefacts was anything more than the sum of its parts. ‘Technology could be found everywhere in the ancient world except in the minds of humans,’ writes Kelly. That changed in 1802, when, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, German economics Professor Johann Beckmann coined the word ‘technology’ to refer to the ‘systemic order’ of tools and machines that were beginning to take over many of the functions previously assumed by humans.
That was just over two hundred years ago. Before that, a spade and mattock were just a spade and a mattock: useful additions to life, which made work easier. After that, they were part of something bigger, at least in Kelly’s telling. Kelly is a techno-utopian, and to him, this thing called ‘technology’ is not just a collection of tools and machines but, as he puts it, ‘a living force.’ He calls this force ‘the technium’, and he describes it like this:
‘The technium extends beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. It includes tangibles like software, law, and philosophical concepts. And most important, it includes the generated impulses of our inventions to encourage more toolmaking, more technology invention, and more self enhancing connections.’
This technium, explains Kelly, is a ‘global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us’, which is taking on its own life and its own mind. It is this last claim that makes his book so interesting. You can find plenty of people who will argue, like Kelly, that technology will save us from pretty much every problem on Earth, if we would only trust it. Techno-utopianism is a subset of the contemporary religion of Progress, into which we are all baptised at birth. If Progress is God, technology is the messiah come to do His will on Earth. In this reading, the benefits of modern technology – fewer deaths in childbirth, dental hygiene, the ability to Tweet a picture of what you had for breakfast to someone on the other side of the planet – are talked up, while its drawbacks – nuclear bombs, mass extinction, climate change, viral videos of Korean pop hits – are glossed over. This is the standard narrative of modernity, and arguing against it is likely to see you labelled a ‘Romantic Luddite’ at best, and a reactionary hater of ‘the poor’ at worst.
